KiwiNZ: I am in Central Llower Hutt and my phone is on two signal bars. I was recently in Gisbourne and reception was hopeless . taupo patchy, Most of SH1 very patchy.

Sounds like you need your phone looked at!

What type is it? Does it do 900MHz 3G?

+1

This is pretty critical to getting good reception on Vodafone outside of the main areas. Heck even within them in some cases! It requires your phone to be capable though, which is something the user/consumer needs to look out for.

Heard one report that suggested TCL had 'frequencies' that would be attractive, along with the customer base and fibre infrastructure.

Are these trunking frequencies for backhaul(?), some other freqs(?), or was the commentator simply mistaken?

TCL own management rights for (off the top of my head) 20Mhz of 1800MHz spectrum and 10Mhz of 2100Mhz spectrum. Vodafone would obviously be interested in the 2100MHz for improving existing 3G as it would give them the ability to deploy quad carrier WCDMA, and at 1800Mhz when combined with their existing 10MHz of spectrum would give them 40Mhz, which would be a fantastic chunk of bandwidth for their LTE Advanced network.

Heard one report that suggested TCL had 'frequencies' that would be attractive, along with the customer base and fibre infrastructure.

Are these trunking frequencies for backhaul(?), some other freqs(?), or was the commentator simply mistaken?

TCL own management rights for (off the top of my head) 20Mhz of 1800MHz spectrum and 10Mhz of 2100Mhz spectrum. Vodafone would obviously be interested in the 2100MHz for improving existing 3G as it would give them the ability to deploy quad carrier WCDMA, and at 1800Mhz when combined with their existing 10MHz of spectrum would give them 40Mhz, which would be a fantastic chunk of bandwidth for their LTE Advanced network.

Interesting, I didn't know that, But I can see how it would have made sense for them to shell out for some of the spectrum to leave themselves open for further expansion.

TCL really do have their fingers in a lot of pies and It is clear to see how most of it would integrate well with Vodafone.

I do however wonder if Telstra are also in talks Telecom over their Mobile network with the intention of putting the money from a TelstraClear sale into purchasing the XT network and branding it directly under Telstra, I don't imagine it would be difficult for them to keep a decent amount of TCL's back-haul to assist with it.